


Pangs

by vorare



Category: Until Dawn (Video Game)
Genre: Cannibalism, Gen, Hard vore, Starvation, Violence, Vore, Wendigo Josh, all the emotions, sort of Climbing Class but just bros
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-13
Updated: 2016-02-13
Packaged: 2018-05-20 05:46:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,261
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5993722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vorare/pseuds/vorare
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>He knew Josh was behind him. Something raw and ancient in his hindbrain that understood the dance of predator and prey knew that, sensed that. And perhaps it was because he knew it that, when he felt the weight of another body crashing into his back, felt hands grasping at his shoulders with a crushing, vice-like grip, his first sensation was not of surprise. It was not even of fear; he was already full up of fear, so afraid that no physical event could possibly make him more afraid. It was something he would only be able to compare, if he had had the presence of mind and the luxury of time to think on it, to the feeling of being caught in tag as a kid. The feeling of </i>damn it, I lost.<i> Only there would not be another round in this game. </i></p>
<p>Chris decides to go back for Josh. He doesn't expect to find him alive, but he believes the least he can do is to be the one to carry his best friend's body back into daylight. </p>
<p>Of course, things don't go as planned.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Fear

         The moment the dank cold stone of the mine passageways closed in around him, the moment he could no longer see the comforting yellow-white glow of daylight behind him, Chris knew he shouldn’t have come back. Even with the small team of police ahead of him, swinging high-intensity flashlights, high-powered rifles and, at Chris’s insistence, one industrial flamethrower, Chris couldn’t shake the feeling of impending doom twisting his stomach into knots. There was no way they were going to find anything good. Mike had claimed that all the wendigoes in the sanatorium were dead and the rest had gone up in the flames of the lodge, but the hair on the back of Chris’s neck still stood on end, imagining one of the long-limbed pale monsters emerging from the darkness of the mine up ahead, opening its terrible jaws in a half-human shriek, or crawling spider-like on the ceiling above their heads, ready to grab, to tear, to decapitate, to _devour_.

            Viscerally, that was what he was afraid of. But there was something else he feared more, something that seemed far more inevitable. The reason he had come. _Josh_. Chris was not hoping to find him alive. It had been weeks since he had been last seen. Mike had said Josh was still alive and screaming when Hannah, when the thing Hannah had become, had dragged him away, splashing and thrashing, through the cold stagnant water. Even if she had somehow left him alive before she had made her way to the lodge, surely he would have been injured, dazed, confused, and certainly unable to make his own way to safety in his deluded state. He would have to have died of starvation and exposure. The thought made Chris’s heart twinge with grief and regret, but it was better than the alternative. The other possibility that Chris didn’t dare to contemplate.

            The police had not been happy about Chris’s insistence on coming with them on their exploratory expedition into the mine. At first they had flat-out refused, but he had managed to convince them that he could be of some help and that he would not get in the way. He didn’t think they really believed any of what they had been told about the curse; maybe if they had they wouldn’t have conceded to let him come along, or maybe they wouldn’t have risked their own people at all. He knew his friends would be far from thrilled as well, and so after some vacillation he had decided not to tell them. He didn’t want them to worry; especially, he didn’t want Ashley to worry. And he didn’t want any of them to decide they ought to come with him. That seemed like something Sam might do. But Josh had been his best friend, and he was his responsibility. He should never have left him alone in the shed. And he never should have let Josh spiral out of control during the year after his sisters’ disappearance. He hadn’t been there for him in the ways he needed; he hadn’t been the best friend Josh needed him to be. He wouldn’t forgive himself for that. Now, the least he could do was be the one to carry his friend’s body back into the daylight.

            He kept several paces behind the police officers, hyper-aware of the sweat on his palm as he gripped his own flashlight, hyper-aware of the frenetic pulse in the side of his neck, of the way the cold damp air felt in the back of his throat, sharp and raw, every time he sucked in a shaky breath. Every footfall sounded like a cacophony on the hard stone underfoot, and Chris subconsciously winced with every step he took, imagining once-human ears tuning in to the sound. They had left daylight behind long enough that the darkness was beginning to take on an almost physical presence, heavy and oppressive in spite of the flashlight beams struggling in vain to illuminate the passageway. Consequently, Chris’s other senses seemed to be ratcheting up into overdrive, his hearing especially. He began to hear more than just the sound of his own footfalls and those of the police ahead of him. He heard the _plink-plink_ of dripping water, the clatter of small stones and the patter of something alive scampering past – _Rats, it’s gotta be rats, just rats –_ and the ominous creak of the old wood supports, constantly threatening yet another cave-in that might claim more victims for the mountain’s curse. His throat tightened with nauseous fear at the thought.

            _Josh, Josh, focus on Josh. I’m getting you out of here, buddy, dead or alive. Probably dead. Hopefully…_ He pushed down the thought.

           The three police officers in front of him were murmuring to each other, something about splitting up to cover more ground, since they had just come into a fork in the tunnel they had been following. “Bad idea,” Chris warned. “Hard to think of a worse idea than that right now, actually.”

           They paid him about as much attention as a fly on the wall. They were already synchronizing their watches and deciding on a time to meet up again, checking to ensure that their walkie-talkies were on the same frequency. Chris felt his stomach clench, knowing he would not be able to change their minds.

           He couldn’t help feeling a bit relieved that the officer with the flamethrower was the one sticking with him. The other two headed down the left hand passageway and it seemed like only moments before the thin slivers of their flashlight beams were swallowed up by the darkness.

          “Y’okay, kid?” asked the officer with the flamethrower, gruffly. Chris knew he must look a wreck, pale and sweating and visibly struggling not to panic. “I can take you back to the entrance if you want.”

          The idea was tempting, for a moment. To just turn around and run from the nightmare again and never look back. But he had come here for a reason, and turning away now would be turning his back on Josh again. Failing Josh again. And that, he couldn’t handle. He swallowed the panic bubbling up in his throat and said, as steadily as he could, “No… no. Let’s keep going.”

          The officer nodded, turned, and started down the right hand passage. Chris followed. His imagination turned every glint of mica in the rocks beneath his flashlight beam into pale eyes. He chose to look at the flamethrower in the officer’s hands instead. _They hate fire. We’re safe as long as we have that._ His mind rebuffed that hope of comfort with a flash of the memory of the stranger outside the shed, flamethrower in hand – how useless it had been when the wendigo, quicker than anything alive had a right to be, sliced his head off as easily as popping the head off a doll. He couldn’t help thinking about the split second afterward when the man’s face had still held an expression. Chris had spent more time than he ever would have wanted to since then wondering how long consciousness clung on after the head was separated from the body. Fear jolted up his spine like an electric shock at the thought that he could soon find out for himself.

          Chris began to feel like he had entered some kind of purgatory on earth. He lost track of how long they had been walking. The passageway seemed to go on forever, occasionally opening up into larger cavern-like spaces with pools of cold dark water, but inevitably the walls would close back in again, and the passageway would twist and turn like the bowels of some giant stone beast. A few times the other officers checked in via the walkie-talkie, and at first their tone was relatively light, but it quickly began to darken as they reported finding what looked like gnawed human bones scattered on the floor of the mine.

          And then, after a long silence, the female officer’s voice crackled over the walkie-talkie. “There’s something down here.”

          The officer in front of Chris stopped to listen. Chris felt like his heart had stopped, while simultaneously, paradoxically feeling it hammer harder than it had since that night on mountain weeks ago. “We have a visual on a survivor,” came the male officer’s voice. “One survivor… repeat.”

          “Oh no, oh no no no no no no _no_ ,” Chris whispered, his flashlight slipping from boneless fingers. The officer with the flamethrower was silent, looking from the walkie-talkie to Chris and back again. 

           He had just raised the radio to his mouth to respond when the voice crackled through again. “Is that –? Oh _fuck! Stay back, no no, stay back!”_ And then there was screaming, the sound of a rifle shot, and the walkie-talkie went silent.

          “Oh God, oh fuck, oh no,” Chris whimpered, “Oh Jesus, we’re dead, we’re fuckin’ dead...”

          “Calm down,” said the officer with the flamethrower, though Chris noticed the tremor in his voice. “Those officers can handle themselves. Whatever it was, I’m sure they shot it dead. Come on. Let’s go back and find ’em.” He turned around and started jogging back the way they had come.

          Chris picked up his flashlight off the ground and followed. He knew they wouldn’t find the other two officers again. His only hope was that they would distract the wendigo – _not Josh, please God, don’t let it have been Josh_ – long enough for him and the officer with the flamethrower to make it back to the cave entrance. Wendigoes don’t hunt during daylight, that was what the stranger had said, and there were still a couple hours of daylight left. That meant the monster wouldn’t follow them out of the mines. If they could just make it back to the entrance, they would be saved.

          But the entrance seemed an eternity away. Chris’s breath came in harsh pants as he ran down the passageway on the heels of the police officer. The way the hand grasping his flashlight swung as he ran made the light strobe in and out of his field of vision. Darkness one second, a flash of the cold stone floor the next, darkness again. _It’s like a nightmare. Am I running away from the danger or right into it?_

         “We’re almost to the split,” barked the officer, and it took Chris’s muddled brain a moment to process what he meant. _We’re almost back to where we parted ways with the others._ That meant they were more than halfway back to the entrance, but it also meant that they had at also roughly halved the potential distance between themselves and whatever had attacked the other officers.

         “To the entrance,” Chris yelled as they neared the split, worried that the foolish officer – no, not foolish, just ignorant of the extent of the danger – would choose to run down the other passageway in search of his colleagues. But the officer didn’t argue with him.

         Chris’s relief at that small victory only lasted a few seconds. As his flashlight beam flicked forward with his stride, he caught a glimpse of a dark shape in the passageway up ahead. A human shape, but hunched over as if in pain, or maybe preparing to spring. The moment Chris saw it he knew he needed to turn around and run the other way, to run for his life, but his momentum kept carrying him forward, near enough for his flashlight beam to illuminate wide, glazed eyes and sharp, jagged teeth. The figure crouched in the passageway had a human shape, not the sickeningly emaciated, elongated form that Chris feared most, but the wendigo was in its eyes and in its red-stained, slaver-dripping gash of a mouth. Chris understood almost instinctively that this was a person who had recently begun their transformation and was now in a limbo between human and not-human – physically, anyway. The vacant malevolence in those eyes seemed to suggest little or no humanity left in the mind or the spirit.

          And the worst part was that, in the same split second that Chris understood all this, he also understood who he was looking at, and he knew him.

          “TURN AROUND!” he screamed, but it was too late and he knew it. Josh leapt on the police officer like a coiled spring released, and Chris saw the orange bloom of fire, felt the wave of heat roll over him, but he didn’t look long enough to see what had happened. Both of the possible outcomes were sickening: either his best friend was going up in flames, or he was tearing off the police officer’s face. And Chris knew that if it ended up being the latter, every second counted and he needed to run back the way he had come as fast as he could for as long as he could without looking back.

          He had only been running for a few seconds when he heard the scream. The scream itself was bad, but its abrupt end was worse. Chris ran harder than he had ever run in his life, his heart pounding, his lungs screaming. He was running into the unknown, deeper into the black heart of the mines, and behind him, between him and the safety of daylight, was a monster wearing the skin of his best friend. _My brain wouldn’t even be able to come up with a nightmare that bad. That’s how I know it’s real. All too fucking real._

            He stumbled, crashed roughly into the wall as he struggled to regain his balance, cursed, kept running. He didn’t dare look over his shoulder. All he knew was that it was run or die.

            He knew Josh was behind him. Something raw and ancient in his hindbrain that understood the dance of predator and prey knew that, sensed that. And perhaps it was because he knew it that, when he felt the weight of another body crashing into his back, felt hands grasping at his shoulders with a crushing, vice-like grip, his first sensation was not of surprise. It was not even of fear; he was already full up of fear, so afraid that no physical event could possibly make him more afraid. It was something he would only be able to compare, if he had had the presence of mind and the luxury of time to think on it, to the feeling of being caught in tag as a kid. The feeling of _damn it, I lost._ Only there would not be another round in this game.

            His head crashed against the hard ground as Josh’s tackle forced him to fall, and he heard a crack that, at first, reflexively, he thought must have been his skull, but realized a second later had been one of the lenses of his glasses. The pain in his head was intense and his vision swam, blackness gnawing at the edges, but he clung on to consciousness, gasping like a fish. That was all he was capable of; struggling back to his feet was out of the question.

            Josh’s face – his horribly distorted face – came into view. It was upside down. Chris realized from the weight on his back that Josh was sitting on top of him, and was leaning down over him to look him in the eye. Accepting that he was effectively already dead, Chris took this few-second lull to look, to really look, at his friend’s ravaged face. He had a gash on his forehead and cuts on his cheeks; his right eye was wider than his left, what was left of the eyelid on the right eye oozing pus and blood, and both eyes were glazed, though they were not milky-white as the eyes of the wendigoes that Chris had seen that night had been. His mouth was wrecked, his half-open jaw hanging a little lopsidedly as the left side of his mouth was torn and bloody, making his mouth wider on that side. The sharp teeth curving crookedly from his gums were dripping with something a little too viscous to be blood alone.

            “I’m sorry,” Chris choked with a sob. “I’m sorry, man. I never should’ve left you. I never should’ve…” The pain in his head intensified and he lost his words, could only cry. Even if there was some part of Josh left in the thing on top of him, Chris didn’t expect his words to garner mercy. He knew his life was forfeit the moment Josh had caught him. He just wanted to say the words. It had to still count for something.

            He felt a hand on the back of his head, fingers tightening in his hair. His head was lifted off the ground for a moment, then slammed forcefully back into the stone floor. Pain exploded through his skull in the instant before unconsciousness took him.

            Blackness.


	2. Pain

            Waking up was a ghastly cocktail of confusion and agony. He was cold, and no matter how wide he opened his eyes, he could not see anything. It was so fucking _dark._ He felt like he was upright, but when he twitched his feet, he felt no ground beneath them. Just empty space. And empty space around him when he stretched out his arms, though there was a feeling of pressure at his underarms, as if something was pulling his jacket up. Was this what death was like? Hovering in empty darkness, possibly forever? And if he was dead, why did his head still hurt so damn much?

            It took several long minutes and a lot of feeling around with his hands to realize where he was. It seemed that he was alive after all, and hanging, by the hood of his coat, from a sharp curved metal hook. He couldn’t get enough leverage to pull his hood off of the hook; he considered wriggling out of the jacket entirely, but then he realized that he had no idea how high off the ground he was, and letting himself fall blindly could result in a broken leg or worse. He needed to better assess the situation before he could do anything, and to better assess the situation he needed to see, and to see he needed _light._

            His flashlight was gone, that much was evident. Probably lying on the ground wherever Josh had taken him down. He mentally lamented its absence for what felt like a long time before it occurred to him that he had another kind of flashlight on his person. He patted the front pocket of his jacket and was relieved to feel the familiar outline of his phone there. He slid his hand into the pocket and extracted it with extreme care, knowing that one fumbling movement could send his only hope of a light source plummeting into the unknown blackness below him. He thumbed the home button and the screen came to life. Its relatively gentle light seemed to stab at his eyes, habituated as they had become to the utter darkness, and it sent a lance of pain through his aching skull, painful enough to make him physically recoil, which caused him to swing slightly on the hook from which he hung. He blinked repeatedly and held tightly to the phone as he waited for his weight to balance him out, and when he had stilled and his eyes had adjusted enough to look without excruciating pain, he read the numbers on the phone screen. _1:02 AM. I’ve been out for… what, at least eight hours. Jesus._ His eyes flicked to the top left of the screen reflexively, and even though he had known what it would say, the little block letters spelling out **NO SERVICE** still made him groan. No hope of summoning rescuers that way.

            He flicked up from the bottom of the phone screen and tapped the flashlight button. The light on the back of the phone flickered on, white and fluorescent. Chris’s eyes adjusted for a moment, and then, rotating the phone slowly to illuminate as much of his environment as possible, he took in his surroundings.

            He had heard about this place from Sam and Mike. They had spoken of it in hushed, horrified whispers as they recounted everything else they had seen in the mine – Hannah’s journal, Beth’s grave. But this place had haunted Chris since he had heard about it, even though he had never seen it with his own eyes. It was, Sam and Mike had surmised with revulsion, the place where the wendigo – where Hannah – had kept her food.

            Corpses – some relatively whole, some disgustingly _not_ whole, many of them headless –hung from other hooks dangling from the ceiling, and bones and body parts, including disembodied heads, were scattered on the floor. This was the wendigo’s larder – Josh’s larder now, evidently. And Chris was in it.

            _But I’m still alive. Why am I still alive?_ Fleetingly, some hopeful, compassionate part of him wondered if Josh had managed to recognize him and had spared his life. But then a darker and more plausible thought came to him. He heard the stranger’s words again as clearly as if the stranger was beside him in the darkness, speaking into his ear: “ _First, the wendigo, he'll render you immobile. And then he strips the skin off your entire body, piece by piece. And then he keeps you alive and aware and feasts on your organs, one piece at a time.”_

            He wasn’t alive because Josh knew him, then. He was alive to be kept fresh. A ready-made hot meal, no prep time required.

            But he was, for now, relatively unscathed. And it was night now. Could that mean that Josh was hunting – that he might even have left the mines? The drop down to the ground didn’t look too far, if he could just unzip his jacket and wriggle out of it. If Josh wasn’t in the mines, maybe Chris would be able to find his way out before he came back. And once he was free of the mines, he’d just have to find somewhere to hide until dawn.

            He had just started to unzip his jacket with the hand not clutching his phone when a sound – a sort of low rumbling, almost a growl – made him freeze. Holding his breath, he redirected his phone’s light toward the source of the ominous sound, the coil of dread tightening in his stomach as he saw one of the forms he had taken for a corpse stirring slightly on the floor. It was Josh, lying face down beside what Chris identified after a moment as the dead body of the officer who had walked with him down the mine passageway, though the man was now short a head. Josh had one arm draped almost protectively over the corpse, but he wasn’t moving much. Was it possible that he was asleep? Could the sound he had heard have been a snore? Did wendigoes even sleep? Even if they didn’t, Chris supposed, there was the possibility that Josh wasn’t far enough along in his transformation to forego it.

           Well, that changed things. Even if Josh was asleep, Chris knew there was probably no way he wouldn’t wake him with the sounds he would inevitably make getting down from the hook and making his way out of the nightmarish chamber of victims. Then again, this might be the best chance he was going to get. Given the amount of food Josh had access to here (Chris cringed at the idea of calling the contents of this place, himself included, _food_ , but he had to acknowledge that that was what it was to Josh now), it was possible that he wouldn’t be leaving it for quite some time. Maybe he would be motivated to hunt by some wendigo instinct anyway, but then maybe he wouldn’t. And Chris had to consider the fact that he could be the next thing on the menu as soon as Josh got up.

_“Fuck,”_ he mouthed silently as he very slowly continued unzipping his jacket, wincing at every little sound he made. He debated for a moment whether or not he should turn off his phone flashlight, wondering how far gone Josh’s vision was, if he could still easily discern more than just movement. But Josh’s head was down; so far the light didn’t seem to have affected him, and anyway Chris didn’t think his already-pounding heart could take trying to escape through pitch darkness, with no way of knowing where Josh was or whether he was stalking after him. At least with the light on he could watch Josh carefully and take defensive measures if Josh started stirring again.

          He finished unzipping the jacket, took a few shaky, steadying breaths. He watched Josh carefully for a few moments, ensuring that he was still before transferring his phone from his hand to his mouth, clutching it between his teeth so that he could work his arms out of his coat sleeves. He slid one arm out at a time, using the one that he wasn’t currently extricating to hold onto the coat and keep him from falling prematurely, and when he was ready he lowered himself down the coat as far as he could to minimize the distance he would have to fall. Finally he grimaced and let go, and an automatic _“Oof!”_ came out of him on impact with the ground, expelling the phone from between his teeth, though luckily he was able to catch it reflexively with his hand.

          He caught his breath and reoriented himself, lifting the phone to look again to the place where Josh was lying… only to see the spot next to the headless police officer was empty. He very nearly pissed himself in fear. _Don’t move and he won’t see you._ That was his only hope. And so he stayed absolutely still, even as every fiber of his being was screaming at him to run for his life.

          For a few eternal seconds, there was only stillness and the sound of blood rushing in Chris’s ears.

          And then Josh was right in front of him, opening his terrible jaws to scream as the wendigoes had screamed, though there was something a touch more human in Josh’s cry, which only made it worse. Chris couldn’t breathe; he didn’t dare move. He couldn’t tell whether Josh’s eyes were focused on him or not, or if they were focused on anything, glazed and pallid as they were. He could only wait for Josh either to move on, or to lunge and rip Chris’s head off.

         But what he did next was something Chris never would have expected: _he spoke._

         It was not so much speaking as screaming, but though they were slurred and distorted, mangled by the disfigurement of Josh’s mouth and teeth, it was definitely words that Josh was struggling to form. And after a few repetitions, Chris understood what those words were. _“You’re not real! You’re not real! YOU’RE NOT!”_

         Chris only had enough time to register horror at the fact that some part of Josh was still conscious inside of this nightmare before Josh’s hands clamped onto his upper arms and Josh’s mouth went to his neck. Chris screamed, more with horror than pain – though pain was soon to come – as Josh’s teeth sank into the join of his neck and shoulder, cutting deep into the meat of his muscle. Josh wrenched his head back like a dog worrying a chew toy, and the chunk of flesh his teeth had framed pulled free, making Chris scream as he had never screamed before.

         The scream finally died in his throat as he watched his own flesh rolling around in Josh’s half-open mouth. The wet, meaty chewing sound of it, coupled with the white-hot agony of his shoulder, was enough to make him nauseous. Then Josh swallowed, the piece of Chris’s shoulder making his throat bulge slightly before it disappeared, and Chris screwed his eyes shut and braced himself for more pain, assuming Josh was going to take another bite out of him, that Josh was going to eat him alive where he stood. But rather than feeling those needle-sharp teeth puncturing his skin again, rather than feeling muscle tearing apart from sinew, he felt Josh take hold of him by his sweater and start to drag him backwards. Taken by surprise and lacking the strength to fight back, Chris fell, and had no choice but to let himself be dragged across the floor. He tried instinctively to look over his shoulder to see where Josh was taking him, which only caused the agony in his torn shoulder muscle to intensify, making him choke out a pitiful whimper as tears eked out of the corners of his eyes.

        Through the haze of pain, he was suddenly aware that he was being pulled up rather than dragged across the floor now, his sweater pulling up over his belly as gravity fought against Josh’s hold on the back of his sweater for dominion over Chris’s weight. But the sweater held taut at his arms and didn’t slip up over his head, and he felt himself being dragged slowly but steadily up the wall. He craned his neck back as far as his screaming wound would allow and saw that Josh was climbing, spider-like, up the sheer stone wall. He realized that this must be how he had gotten up on the hook in the first place, and that that was probably where Josh intended to put him again. But this time he didn’t have his jacket on, with its large hood to hang him by. He could only imagine that Josh was going to hang him up in a bloodier fashion now, a suspicion which seemed to be confirmed when Josh transferred his grasp from Chris’s sweater to his upper arm for better leverage. Chris found himself face to face with the hook where his jacket still hung like an effigy. The way he was lined up now, if Josh slammed him down onto the hook, it was going to go right through his neck and up through his jaw. He’d probably drown in his own blood.

         “Josh!” he screamed in his desperation, trying to implore whatever part of him was left, whatever volition had made him speak, before. “Listen, it’s me, man, it’s Chris, I’m real! Don’t stab me with that thing, okay? Look, if you want me back on the hook, I’ll get back in my jacket! I won’t fight you!”

         He had no way of knowing whether Josh had understood him or if he was simply puzzled by the sounds his prey was making, but either way, he was still, and made no move to slam Chris onto the hook as he had seemed ready to do moments ago. Chris chose to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he must have understood, and with the arm that wasn’t grasped inescapably by Josh’s hand, he reached out toward his jacket, slipping his hand into the sleeve, still clutching his phone tightly. Josh let him do it, and once he had leaned out far enough to get his arm all the way into the sleeve, Chris felt Josh’s grip on his other arm loosening, and a moment later he was free of it, struggling to get that arm into its sleeve as well. He zipped himself in and looked back at Josh. Josh was gazing at him impassively with his pale eyes, blood – Chris’s blood – slowly dripping down his chin.

         “Look, I’m back where you put me. No harm, no foul,” said Chris. He knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t shake the feeling that Josh must have understood him. He must have. Why else would he have let Chris do that? “I can’t believe you’re just climbing on the wall like that,” he added with a short bark of hysterical laughter. “You’re like Spider-Man, look at you. Remember those action figures we used to play with when we were kids? You used to –”

          Josh screamed. _“YOU’RE! NOT! REAL!”_ And then, words that cut more deeply than Josh’s teeth ever could: _“Chris would never come back for me.”_ Slurred and guttural as they were, Chris understood every word, and each one was like a hard punch in the gut. That one phrase meant two enormous things: first of all, that Josh recognized him; and second, that Josh could not believe Chris could really be here because he did not trust that Chris would have come back for him.

          He imagined what the past few weeks must have been like for Josh, plagued not only by the dark and cold of the cursed mines but tormented, too, by his own mind and hallucinations. Maybe, at first, if he had been lucid enough to consider it, he might have hoped that Chris and the others would come for him. But as the days and then the weeks had passed, he must have lost that hope. He must have been so lonely, so cold, so scared… so hungry.

          Chris felt the warmth of tears on his cheeks. “I wanted to come back sooner,” he whispered, his voice choked by the tears. “I wanted to, Josh. I thought about it every day. But I just… _couldn’t._ The police were, and my parents, and Ash said – I – I don’t have any excuse, I know, I should’ve, I don’t know why I didn’t…” He wept for what felt like a long time before he said, “I was just too _scared_ , Josh. But I’m here now… I came for you.”

           Josh was silent again, watching him, the emotion that had twisted his disfigured features when he had spoken gone. His tongue flicked out over the row of sharp teeth protruding over his lower lip and slurped up a drop of Chris’s blood from his chin before disappearing back into the darkness of his mouth.

          “We could get out of here,” Chris went on. “We could just leave. Please, Josh, let’s just leave this terrible place and never look back, okay? I know you’ve… changed. But we can get you help. I’m sure there’s someone somewhere out there who knows how to reverse this, this… what’s happened to you. And hell, maybe just getting away from this fucking mountain would undo it. The curse is tied to this place, this goddamned awful fucking place. Let’s just get you out of here, okay, please?”

          Josh’s mouth opened wider, and for a moment Chris truly thought he was going to reply. But all that came out was a harsh scream, a wordless scream, a wendigo scream. And then Josh was crawling back down the wall, crawling away into the darkness, leaving Chris alone on his hook.

          Chris followed Josh’s movement with his phone light, watched him return to the spot next to the beheaded police officer. He watched with a sort of detached revulsion as Josh began to claw off the man’s clothing to get at his skin, and once the man’s abdomen was bared, watched him plunge his jaws into the soft flesh of the corpse’s belly and resurface with a dripping mouthful of entrails and meat and fat. If Chris had had to describe the look on Josh’s face in that moment, the sound he made as he swallowed the grisly mouthful, he would have had to call it bliss. It made bile rise in Chris’s throat.

           It seemed evident after a few minutes that Josh was going to be occupied for a while, and though the thought of plunging the chamber back into total darkness made Chris shudder, he knew it was downright stupid to waste his phone battery by keeping the flashlight on for too long. He took a shuddering breath, and then tapped the button on his phone screen to turn off the flashlight. After the screen had gone black again, Chris found himself suspended in pitch blackness once more. He tucked the phone carefully into his jacket pocket; his hand was aching from holding it so tightly for so long, and with the combined pain of his still-aching head and his throbbing bitten shoulder, he wanted to make absolutely sure that if he lost consciousness, he wouldn’t lose his phone to the oblivion below.

           He could no longer see what Josh was up to, but he could hear it, and the longer he remained in total darkness, the more acute his hearing seemed to become. Every fleshy tearing sound, all the wet, frenetic chewing noises, each thick meaty swallow, seemed to echo and linger in Chris’s ears. He was not sure whether the reality could possibly be worse than the visual that his imagination was offering up, but he didn’t want to find out.

           He could feel the blood pooling in what he had begun to think of as the hole in his shoulder, and could feel it dripping down his chest and back and soaking into the fabric of his sweater. He wasn’t sure how much blood he had already lost and how much he was going to lose before the wound coagulated. He was exhausted and he was in pain, and the blood loss wasn’t helping anything. He began to feel faint and dizzy, and more than once jolted in confusion at the imagined sensation of the chain from which his hook hung spinning. The movements had the unpleasant side effect of actually causing the chain to spin and rotate slowly, exacerbating Chris’s faintness. Though everything was pitch dark, he began to see grayish graininess in his field of vision and knew it was a sign that he was not going to be able to stay conscious for much longer. Finally he blacked out, not knowing whether or not he was ever going to wake up again. Part of him almost hoped he wouldn’t.

          Better to sleep soundly forever than to keep on living in a nightmare.


	3. Hunger

          But Chris did wake up. And when he woke up he was aware of a number of things, all of them physical and none of them pleasant. He was in pain, fierce, lingering, bone-deep pain. He was cold enough, or maybe he had lost enough blood, or maybe some combination thereof, that he couldn’t feel his fingers and toes. His throat ached with thirst and hunger pangs cramped his gut. He had to piss so bad it hurt.

          Well, at least he could remedy one of those things. He reached down with his hand – his left, since his right arm felt as heavy and useless as a hunk of lead with the aching hole in his shoulder – unzipped, pulled himself out, and pissed into the darkness. He felt a momentary relief, but when that was done, he didn’t feel better, just more acutely aware of all the other things still ailing him – and there was nothing he could do about them.

          With numb fingers, he extracted his phone from his pocket and tapped the home button. He had just intended to turn on the flashlight, but his thumbprint unlocked the phone automatically and his first page of apps appeared onscreen. There was a red number 1 next to the Messages app. Funny, he’d thought he’d read all his messages before he started the trek up the mountain with the police officers, and he couldn’t have received anything since he had entered the no-service zone that seemed to encompass the vast majority of the mountain and its environs. The text must have slipped in in between the last time he had checked his phone and the start of this ill-fated expedition. He knew it was stupid to waste battery life on looking at a message he had no way to reply to, but he tapped the Messages app anyway. Even the tiny comfort of a friend’s typed words would be welcome right now.

          His throat tightened when he saw that it was from Ashley, and the words blurred as his eyes filled with tears. _Hey you’ve been quiet today… everything ok? What do you think about seeing a movie tonight? I know dark rooms aren’t really our thing right now but I promise it’ll be low key. Or we could just talk. Lmk._ And it ended with a kissing emoji, the one with the little red heart. It was more than Chris could take; he wept. Wept at the thought that he was never going to see Ash again, that she might never know what had happened to him. Wept for everything he had thrown away by coming back here. Wept for that goddamned kissing emoji that, coming from Ash, would have made his heart flutter and his face heat before any of this had happened.

          When the sobs had stopped wracking him, more because of exhaustion than because his grief had run its course, Chris held the phone close to his chest for a moment, as if he could transmit some last feelings through it to the girl he cared about most. Then, with a shuddering breath, he tapped on the flashlight.

          He cried out reflexively in shock when the flashlight illuminated Josh’s face less than a foot away from his own. Chris realized that he was facing the wall and that Josh must have climbed it again. How long he might have been there, staring at Chris in the darkness, Chris didn’t want to imagine. When a few long minutes had elapsed and Josh hadn’t attacked, Chris found his voice, though it was shaking. “Hey buddy,” he said weakly. “I’m still here, see? Still real. Still me. Chris.”

          Josh said nothing. A flap of someone else’s skin was hanging off of one of his curved teeth.

          “We can still get out of here. Whenever you’re ready. We’ll go together. Okay?”

           Josh was still silent. He lifted one of his hands, and as it came into the pool of light cast by Chris’s phone, Chris saw that he was clutching a handful of slimy dripping meat. And rather than bringing it to his own mouth as Chris had at first assumed he would do, Josh held it out. Right in front of Chris’s face. Right in front of Chris’s mouth.

           “Oh, _gross,_ oh my god, _hurk –_ ” The sight and smell of the raw flesh so close to his face was too much for Chris, and he turned his head away from it, his body tensing as he retched and vomited. It was only bile that came up, dribbling down his chin and onto his jacket front; Chris’s stomach was empty. When he turned back, Josh was still holding the disgusting offering out to him. “Please, Josh, fuck, don’t give me that. I don’t want that. I’m… not hungry, okay?”

_"Hunnnngry,”_ Josh echoed plaintively, and he finally stopped holding the meat out to Chris and stuffed it greedily into his own mouth. The next moment he was crawling away down the wall and had disappeared from Chris’s field of vision.

           Chris coughed and gagged, struggling to get the mingled taste of bile and smell of dead human flesh out of his mouth and nose. Only when the nausea had finally left him did he stop to really consider what had just happened. _He tried to feed me._ Maybe that meant that Josh wanted to help Chris rather than hurt him; maybe that was the only way to help Chris that Josh could understand now. Or maybe… maybe something darker was at play. A considerable number of wendigoes had died on the mountain that night weeks ago. And if the way the curse was described by the stranger could be taken as truth, that meant that there were disembodied wendigo spirits lurking in the mountain now, just waiting for a human to possess. If Chris had choked down that lump of flesh, it would have opened him up for possession by one of the hungry spirits. Maybe that was what Josh – or what the monster inside of Josh now – wanted. To perpetuate the curse.

           It had been easy to turn away from the putrid offering now. But Chris knew that the longer Josh kept him here, the harder that was going to become. It was hard to imagine that he could ever get hungry enough to want to eat what Josh had just tried to give him, but if all those miners had gotten hungry enough to do it, if Hannah had gotten hungry enough to do it, if Josh had gotten hungry enough to do it, Chris knew that it was foolish and idealistic to think that his own body would not betray him in the same way as theirs had. His stomach was already growling and cramping and it had only been about twenty-four hours since he had last eaten, though admittedly he hadn’t been eating well in the past few weeks. He didn’t want to think about how it would feel if he ended up being here for weeks.

          He hoped Josh would just kill him. That would be preferable by far than slowly starving up on this hook, and maybe succumbing to the curse that had already turned two of his friends into flesh-craving monsters. A horrible thought occurred to him then: _What if he’s punishing me? What if this is his way of getting back at me for not coming for him sooner, before it was too late?_ That idea was almost worse than all the others combined.

           He found that he could push off against the wall with his foot to rotate the chain of his hook, allowing him to reorient himself for a better view of the entire chamber. He kept his flashlight on for a few minutes more, watching Josh. At first he was crawling toward one of the police officers’ corpses, no doubt for more to eat, but then he began to writhe and twitch, and made sounds that Chris could only characterize as cries of pain. As he watched Josh’s back arch and his limbs twist, he realized that, of course, Josh was still changing. Transforming, day by day, hour by hour, into something that retained only the twisted shadow of a human form.

           Chris turned off the flashlight. He didn’t need to see his friend going through that.

           Uncounted hours passed in the darkness. Chris almost wished he was unconscious. He could hear Josh – often eating, sometimes climbing the walls or pacing like a caged animal, occasionally speaking. When he did speak, the words were not encouraging; they suggested a definitive lack of lucidity. _“I don’t take orders from you!”_ and _“Get out of my head!”_ were frequent. Sometimes, heartbreakingly, Chris would hear him call out for his sisters, or his friends. He called for Hannah; he called for Beth; he called for Sam, and more than once, he called for Chris. Chris wanted to respond when he heard Josh call his name, wanted to reassure Josh that he was here, he was real, but fear kept his mouth closed. It was one thing to talk when he had the flashlight on, when Josh was right in front of him, his attention already on Chris for better or worse. In the uncertain darkness, he couldn’t bring himself to make a sound; whenever he thought of calling out to Josh, he imagined Josh deciding to devour him now after all, or worse, force-feeding him human meat. So he stayed silent, listening mutely to his friend’s torment, hating himself.

           His pain only got worse as time passed. His wound didn’t seem to be bleeding anymore, but it ached deeply, and he knew there was almost no chance that it wasn’t infected, given all the unsavory things Josh had been putting in his mouth lately. His arms were sore from the constant pressure put on them by hanging from his jacket. His head pounded so badly that he was sure he had a concussion, if not a skull fracture. He had been so cold for so long that uncontrollable shivering had given way to an unsettling stillness. And he was so painfully thirsty that the sound of water dripping somewhere in the chamber became a torture to him. Maybe, he thought, he would just die before Josh had the chance to kill him or the curse to take hold of him. But that seemed almost too merciful a solution given how his luck had panned out so far.

           He kept his phone off most of the time, trying to conserve what little battery it had left. He only turned it on whenever he felt like a day had gone by, though it was often difficult to tell, as sometimes minutes felt like hours and sometimes hours felt like minutes in the unchanging darkness. But it felt like almost every time he turned on the phone, the date had changed. The fact that so much time was passing did not give him hope of rescue. If the police sent anyone to follow up on their missing officers, Josh would just eat them. And as for him, no one who cared about him even knew he was here. Not his parents. Not his friends. Not Ash.

           It was hard to decide which was worse, the pain or the thirst. Chris found that he could lean close enough to the wall to lick condensation from the stone, which tasted of mildew, but at least it was a little bit of liquid for his aching throat. But his right arm was effectively useless now, and the pain that had at first been concentrated at the site of the bite seemed to be spreading throughout his body.

           And there was hunger, too. Even during moments when everything else was quiet in the chamber, Chris could hear his own stomach growling. It felt like he was being stabbed repeatedly from the inside out. He couldn’t help fantasizing about food, even though he knew that would only make it worse. Fries and sandwiches and chocolate and strawberries and everything he wished he could be stuffing his face with right now. But he would not let himself think about meat. If he let his mouth start watering at the thought of cooked meat, raw meat might not be such a stretch anymore, and then…

           It seemed that every third or fourth time that Chris turned on his phone and put on the flashlight for a look around, Josh would be there on the wall. And every time that he was, he had meat in his hand that he would proffer to Chris. Chris always turned his face away, but he no longer vomited at the smell, and it was getting harder and harder to tell Josh that he wasn’t hungry.

          Josh looked a little different every time Chris saw him. He was changing, slowly but surely. His limbs were beginning to thin and elongate, and a few chunks of his hair had fallen out. The claw-like nails that had replaced his normal fingernails were longer and more pronounced than ever. His eyes were whiter and wider than they had been when Chris had first seen them. And he talked less and less, to Chris and to himself. Chris was fairly certain that Josh had begun leaving the mines at night to hunt, and that if Chris was going to escape that would be his best chance to do it, but he also had to acknowledge he would hardly have the strength left to get himself down from the hook, let alone to escape from the labyrinthine mine tunnels before dawn. He just didn’t have the strength.

_Strength._ Josh was so strong now. Hannah had been so strong. A terrible idea occurred to Chris, and though some part of him was well aware of how dreadful an idea it was, he could not cast it aside. _I could be strong too. Strong enough to get out of this place. It would just take one bite…_

         If he took one bite and let the wendigo into him, let it give him its incredible strength, he could be free. Surely he would be able to resist the other effects of the curse long enough to just get himself away from the mountain. Maybe he could even save Josh, too. And he was so hungry… just one bite couldn’t hurt. It would be fixable. Reversible. It had to be.

         He fought with himself over the idea for what felt like a long time, but eventually he decided that it was either this plan or slow, inevitable, painful death. If this plan worked as he hoped it could, it meant he might be able to go home again. He might be able to see Ashley again. He turned on his phone – at 2% battery – just to read and reread her last text to him again, grieving but far too dehydrated to cry. And it made up his mind for him.

_“Josh!”_ he called feebly into the dark. “Josh! I’ll take the meat now! I’ll take it! Please, I’m so… _hungry,_ oh my God, forgive me… but please, just give it to me!”

         The chamber was silent. Josh must be out hunting. Trembling, Chris unzipped his jacket, peeled it away from where his dried blood had adhered it to his skin, and pulled his left arm out of the sleeve. He couldn’t move his right arm, and he tried to pull it slowly out of its sleeve with his left, but gravity took over and he fell to the ground suddenly, hard.

          He lay there for a few minutes, whimpering in pain, every part of him feeling broken, defeated. But finally he mustered the strength to lift his left hand and turn on the phone flashlight, and then he crawled slowly, painfully, his useless arm dragging at his side, across the floor. His underused limbs screamed with every movement.

          Finally, he reached the nearest remains of a corpse, the body of one of the police officers already more than half-eaten by Josh. The meat was starting to putrefy, but the cold had kept it relatively fresh. Looking at the bloody inner cavities of the body laid bare, Chris could not bring himself to feel disgust anymore. There was nothing left in him but despair and hunger. So much hunger. He let his phone fall to the ground as he reached out with his hand to scoop out a handful of the soft meat; the beginnings of rot made the meat pull away easily from the ribs.

          The meat felt slimy and cool in his fingers. Without thinking, without hesitation, he lifted it to his mouth, chewed, swallowed. The feeling of something solid in his throat after so many days – weeks? It had to have been weeks by now – with nothing at all may as well have been the best thing he had ever felt.

_Just one bite,_ he had promised himself, but there was no point in stopping there. He realized that now. After all, maybe the more he ate, the quicker the wendigo strength would come to him. He tore out another handful, and another, and another, and then he stopped using his hand and just let his mouth sink directly into the flesh. _So hungry… so good._

          When he paused to catch his breath, feeling the blood run down his chin, he lifted his head and saw Josh looming over him, white eyes gleaming in the now-sputtering light of the dying phone. If he hadn’t known that the rictus of Josh’s sharp bloody teeth was permanent, he would have sworn that Josh was grinning at him. 


End file.
